Book 7: Made To Stick

After the four wings of “The Dragonfly Effect”, now Heath brothers--Chip Heath and Dan Heath present us “Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” 6 steps on how to make it go viral and memorable, 6 “wings” to SUCCESs, similar to the concept of “ The dragonfly effect”.

“Shorten your elevator speech.” is one of the lessons in the book. Information makes people think, but emotion makes them act. It's the showing, not the telling that effects more.

But why some ideas fail??? "This is the Curse of Knowledge," write the authors, describing what they consider the single biggest reason so many messages fail to stick. "Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. [It] becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can't readily re-create our listeners' state of mind." Here I would like to share an example I found interesting related to this topic:

*In 1990, Elizabeth Newton-a psychology Ph.D. candidate at Stanford conducted a study in which she assigned people to one of two roles: "tappers" or "listeners." Tappers received a list of well-known songs, such as "Happy Birthday to You" and "The Star- Spangled Banner." Each tapper was asked to pick a song and tap out the rhythm to a listener. The listener's job was to guess the song.

Over the course of the experiment, 120 songs were tapped out. Listeners guessed only 2.5 percent of the songs; that is, only 3 out of 120.

The tappers were flabbergasted that the listeners had such a difficult time guessing the song. Why? Because the tapper "hears" the song in their head as they tap. But all the listener hears is isolated taps. So while the tapper thinks that it's obvious that they're tapping out "Happy Birthday", the listener has a really hard time making out what the song is. The tappers have been given knowledge which makes it very difficult for them to imagine what it's like not to have that knowledge.*

I wish very thing was as simple as following some steps / rules and ooopppsss you became successful…

Book 8 - What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

The book “What got you here won’t get you there” is a good study on leadership development from the author Marshall Goldsmith.

When we look back in the history, during the industrial age (1780 – 1980), it was the Means of Production (land, equipment, raw material, capital) that lead to competitive advantages. Whereas now we have entered the “Knowledge Age”, it will be high performing Talent that will lead to competitive advantages.

People will do something-including changing their behaviour-only if it can be demonstrated that doing so is in their own best interests as defined by their own values. Most people’s resistance to change can be overcome by invoking natural law. Everyone, even the biggest ego in the room, has a hot button that can be pushed-and that button is self-interest.

But, what will help us to succeed is:
1. Identify one behavior you want to change in your life. The behavior change should bring about a positive difference in your life.
2. Describe the behavior you want to change in a one-on-one dialogue with someone: a spouse, child, best friend, or coworker—or in the case of the ICF-NYC meeting, a perfect stranger would do.
3. Ask that person for two suggestions for the future that might help you achieve a positive change in your selected behavior.
4. Listen attentively to the suggestions. Take notes if you like. Your only ground rule: You are not allowed to judge, rate, or critique the suggestions in any way. And you are not even to say anything positive such as, “That’s a good idea.” The only response you’re permitted is, “Thank you.”

I think this points we all have to think and carry with us during our business and daily life.

Regards,
Anri

Book 7 - Made to stick

"We must create ideas that are both simple and profound"

This was a quote from the book, “Made to Stick” of brother Chip and Dan Heath. Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? In Made to Stick, the authors Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the "human scale principle," using the "Velcro Theory of Memory," and creating "curiosity gaps." They show to us how to grab people’s attention in an information rich economy, get your ideas through, and make the message stick with a simple formula. The two authors use their first of six principles, “Simplicity”, in their stickiness formula by making their six principles form an acronym SUCCESs:

1. Simplicity: the idea must be stripped to its core idea, the touchstone, and the most important benefits of the touchstone should jump out
2. Unexpectedness: the idea must destroy preconceived notions about something. This forces people to stop, think, and remember
3. Concreteness: Visible in real life experiences, avoid statistics, use real-world analogies to help people understand complex ideas
4. Credibility: Must be believable, if people don't trust you, they'll ignore you
5. Emotions: information makes people think, but emotion makes them act
6. Stories: telling a story [gets] people into paying closer attention, and feeling more connected

Reading the book about sticky ideas makes us hope the authors’ make their own principles sticky – and the Heaths do so using what they teach. Each principle contains story from our real-life, and these examples of ideas stuck in people’s minds. They stuck in our mind as the stories used are entertaining, funny and interesting for all of us.

We all have a message to deliver in the end of the day so it is on us to make this message get delivered properly and stacked in receiver minds. I think remembering the word SUCCESs and its principles will help all of us in our daily life.

Regards,
Anri

Made to Stick

Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck

Brothers Chip Heath and Dan Heath are very successful with sticky ideas, it is enough to mention the “Switch” book with their “Direct the rider, Motivate the elephant, Shape the path”. In the “Made to stick” book they introduced us with a new “SUCCESs” recipe of sticky ideas:

Simple – core + compact
Unexpected – pay attention, “curiosity”
Concrete – understand and remember
Credible – agree / believe
Emotional - care
Stories – be able to act on

The authors came out with those 6 principles after investigating hundreds of stories and mythic ideas which are sticky, sometimes for tens, hundreds years. If we can inderstand and practically use SUCCESs principles as a guide or checklist, it will help us to make our ideas more powerful and easy to remember while preparing any text, article or presentation.

“Fight sticky ideas with stickier ideas.”

I would like to finalize with a quote of the writer, Alvin Toffler, known for his works, among others, about communication revolution: “The illiterate of the 21st Century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”


Sincerely,
Tatiana

Book 6 – The Dragonfly Effect

The Social media that we use on our everyday life is a powerful tool. The book, The Dragonfly Effect, teaches every day people to achieve their goals in life by using social media tools that will make a positive change in our living environmental. The Internet, e-mail, texting, Facebook, Twitter, Flicker, LinkedIn, and YouTube – the list goes on – enables us to tap into these media to obtain the support of others. The intention is to create a social change or a movement that will empower others to take action.

The authors, Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith with Carlye Adler use a new image of symbolism, the dragonfly – a symbol of change, and builds upon this concept to create a framework of how to make a change for the social good. The Dragonfly Effect creates a platform for us to embrace the true power of the social media to capture a mass audience at little or no cost. The idea is that a single goal can be accomplished by taking the necessary steps to execute a successful outcome. To be successful at using the social media, the authors introduce a model of the dragonfly’s four wings:

Wing 1: Focus / concentrate on a single out-come rather than “thinking big”
Wing 2: Grab attention / impress through originality or take people by surprise, get noticed by your target audience.
Wing 3: Engage / get your target audience emotionally involved in your cause (Engage is arguably the most challenging of the four wings, because engaging others is more of an art than a science and has little to do with logic or reason)
Wing 4: Take action / spur your audience to actually act on behalf of your cause,

To sum up, the Dragonfly Effect demonstrates that one doesn’t need money or power to cause seismic social change. With the energy, focus, and a good wireless connection, anything is possible. As an example, as we all know the demonstrates that have taken place in Middle East they were supported widely with the social media such as facebook or youtube.

Regards,
Anri

Book 5 - Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India Are Reshaping Their Futures-and Yours

The book is a very interesting study from Tarun Khanna, the author of the book who publishes this book in February 2008 and had a big interest in the world wide audience. Although the claim of "billions" of entrepreneurs is a bit too much, there is without any doubt that both China and India are having fast economic development and that a driving force in their economic growth is their private sectors with the control from the state. In both countries we are seeing that half a billion people are changing their status from poverty and into the productive workforce will profoundly affect on the world economy. India and China are doing just that with insane growth rates and lots of what used to be American jobs: China is the factory floor and India the back-office, software shop. China is top-down party driven. India is a messy, vibrant democracy.

Even though in this book the countries are being studied together we all can see that there is a huge difference between these countries and is China that worldwide is more known. Today, China as a seat in UN Security Council meanwhile India doesn’t. The state of China has a bigger impact in the America and Europe and even in the production line China is one step in front of India.

To close, it looks like we all will need to learn Chinese for the future...

Regards,
Anri

The Dragonfly Effect

Quick, Effective, and Powerful ways to use Social Media to drive Social Change

“The whole world turns upside down in ten years, but you turn upside down with it.” Spider Robinson

Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith, the authors of this book, introduced us with the model

focus, grab attention, engage, take action

how to use social media to reach any goal in our business or private life. However they finalized their book with warning, saying that though we might think we understand social media – in reality we don’t:

One of the actions which may occur by power of social media is flash mob. This action happens in public places where many people accidentally gather together, do strange and sometimes pointless things (based on prearranged scenario: eat carrots, applaud, etc.) for around 5 minutes and then go away.

I would like to tell a story named “Flash Mob Gone Wrong” which once upon a time could have happened somewhere in the world. The story started from uploading a video of singing girl which was rapidly spread all over the internet. In 10 minutes it was watched by 5000 people, in 23 minutes - by 50 000, in an hour – by 150 000. It became possible to track the singing girl’s her name, twitter account, location, etc…
Afterwards her ex-boyfriend appeared and found it interesting to share her home address in the comments to the video. Someone mentioned a word “flash mob” and hundreds of people already were gathering near the house of that girl, asking her to sing. As the story goes, Someone called the police, Power outage happened, 3G connection dropped out in the singing girl’s neighborhood…at the end – 23 people died, including the singing girl and hundreds got arrested…

This story might seem crazy and unreal but it shows how quickly internet may work and consequences it could lead to if we use social media’s powers with bad intention or even without... You never know.

I kindly advise you to watch this video here: http://igniteshow.com/videos/flash-mob-gone-very-very-wrong

Tatiana